JOSM quick start guide by John Whelan

[Nick-Tallguy]

This looks as if it could make a very good 'quick start guide'

From emails to HOT on 06/03/2015

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Right the basic idiot guide.

First write down your OSM userid and password.

For task 917 we only care about highways, settlements and buildings. Buildings if only because if there is one in isolation sometimes we like to map it rather than call it a landuse=residential.

Start JOSM up, in the edit menu you'll find preferences down the bottom.

We need to allow HOT to remotely control JOSM to feed it the bit to map. So look for the remote control, usually second button up on the left. Click enable remote control, ignore the rest.

Now we need to add a plugin, fourth tile down is the plugin button. Download the list. Look for buildings_tool they're in alphabetical order, click it and ignore the rest.

go to http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/917

Read the instructions.

Click on a tile, click on start mapping, select edit with JOSM.

Switch back to JOSM and you'll find its pulled in the existing OSM map for the tile.

We want to look at the imagery so look across the top, File, Edit etc until you reach Imagery, for this one we will be using Bing so select Bing.

Now we need to trace over the image. We'll use two buttons directly under file, the top one is select, the second one is draw nodes. Hover the mouse over them to display the tags.

Zoom in to the image, generally speaking I zoom so that roughly 90 meters shows on the scale. Personally I start at the top right corner and use to scan the image.

The following is not the official way to do things but its fast. Draw round each settlement but don't tag it. If you're lucky enough to find a road joining settlements draw the highway in again don't tag it. As you go draw round each settlement you see on the road. Stick to one type of highway omit the others for the moment.

The upload button is the fourth button from the left near Tools.

When you upload JOSM will give you a warning, cancel the upload. On the right hand side normally at the bottom you'll see a Validation Results box, click on the + by the warning. You'll see untagged ways. Highlight the untagged ways and select them.

In tags Add landuse=residential to them all.

Click the upload button once more, again you'll get a warning this time saying landuse residential has unclosed ways, select these as a group.

In tags Edit and change the tag to highway=unclassified.

Now upload. You may need your OSM userid and password at this point.

You'll notice that JOSM already has the source of the image filled in and the HOT tile etc.

Now go back and look for highway=tracks. Again don't tag until JOSM warns you on uploading then tag them all at once.

For rectangle buildings press b for the building plug-in, now find the longest side and mouse click one corner, follow the edge to the next corner then click again, now drag the mouse to the other side. Click once more and the building is done and correctly tagged for HOT.

There is a lot more to JOSM but this guide's objective is to get you going productively quickly.

Cheerio John

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Thank you for testing it.

The grab handle needs to be added, press and hold the right mouse button then move the mouse.

From the mapper's point of view the building tool is very nice as you say, marking the settlements then tagging them all once is much faster so you feel as if you are accomplishing more.

From the maps point of view we get less wasted effort and we get a cleaner map. I've changed hundreds if not thousands of area=yes to building=yes tags, JOSM will tell you if two highways are almost touching, this is important for routing. It will spot duplicate buildings, and I've seen a number of these, sometimes both have the same author on them.

Perhaps someone could add/incorporate this idiot guide to the learn OSM page? It would need to be extended to include the grab handle.

Thanks

Cheerio John

[rkiddy]

There should be something where platform-specific issues are discussed for a beginner. I have been using iD with Firefox on an Ubuntu 14.04 system on my laptop. That editor seems to have problems. I would create a shape on a building and then I had to jump through hoops to get the shape-helper icons. Click on something else, click on a blank area, click on another window and come back, click and wait a second and click again. I never could figure out exactly what I had to do to get the shape-tool icons reliably. With this quick guide, I tried JOSM and it works much better with this keyboard. A Linux-specific guide might mention this kind of thing. Certainly there are differences in the control keys and such and this can be a blocking issue for new users.

[jmarlena]

Should this be incorporated into its own JOSM QuickStart Guide, one of the existing JOSM pages for beginners, or elsewhere?

[rkiddy]

Well, here is something specific I figured out.

In the , I see:

• Basic Operations
  ** To move the map left or right, up or down, hold your right mouse button down, and move your mouse.

I discovered that one can also move the map by using what the JOSM developers call +. On Ubuntu, this is ctrl-arrow. On MOSX, it may be ctl or cmd. I am not sure. The paragraph above can have this fact added. A right-click-drag is awkward on my laptop's trackpad.

Also, it would be helpful to say:

"To pan the map view, or to move the map left or right, up or down, hold your right mouse button down"

For one thing, this should make "pan" findable.

[jmarlena]

I went through all the steps in the tutorial above and rewrote them as a script for a screencast or tutorial video. See gist below for details:

Screencast Script for JOSM Quick Start Guide:
https://gist.github.com/jmarlena/7a4e613fa9ef196d3edf

Comments/text I don't understand from original text:

1. What does this comment mean?
   “Buildings if only because if there is one in isolation sometimes we like to map it rather than call it a landuse=residential.”

2. What is the official way? Editing one feature and tagging it right after?
   "The following is not the official way to do things but its fast."

3. Any helpful guidelines about mapping with GPS tracks? How does this affect mapping buildings?
   Aerial imagery might be misaligned. Please check its offset using GPS tracks! 
   http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_Imagery

[jmarlena]

Here's the basic intro to JOSM script for a new video I started back in January too.
https://gist.github.com/jmarlena/5f223c9ff65400a0acc6

[Nick-Tallguy]

@jmarlena sorry about the delay in replying - running in circles at the moment.

1). A cluster of buildings is often a small hamlet and should be surrounded by a landuse=residential boundary. But what to do with a building found in isolation - most of us trace it and tag as building=yes, as there is not enough to outline with landuse=residential

2). Basically yes, when starting most people trace something then tag it afterwards before moving onto the next feature.

4). Imagery layers are made up of a large number of square or rectangular photographs which have been 'warped' and otherwise adjusted to make them as accurate as possible, but they can still be many metres out of alignment in places - it has an 'offset'. For OpenStreetMap purposes a location is best placed by using a gps, so gps traces in an area are a desirable item. IF gps traces have been uploaded to OSM, then they can be downloaded as a layer in JOSM. When other imagery is also loaded, in order to correct any offset, the gps layer is loaded, then the imagery layer is 'moved' so that the roads and junctions align with the gps traces.